Centaur-Shield

A Rich Picture represent what we know about a messy sit­u­a­tion —  the issues, actors, prob­lems, processes, rela­tion­ships, con­flicts and moti­va­tions — so that we can rea­son about these aspects. It is a graph­i­cal tool that addresses that state of uncer­tainty at the begin­ning of an explo­ration or inquiry when all we know that we are deal­ing with a prob­lem­atic sit­u­a­tion, and moves us to a state where we have iden­ti­fied one or more themes we want to address. Rich pic­tures are tools to learn not only about the obvi­ous facts of a sit­u­a­tion, but also about abstract or emo­tional things like the social atmos­phere among the actors.




A rich pic­ture can cope with what­ever chaotic mess of thoughts and per­cep­tions flows onto the page. Rich pic­tures do not have a for­mal syn­tax, and dif­fer­ent peo­ple take dif­fer­ent approaches, but these gen­eral guide­lines have emerged as being useful:

• Include struc­ture. Struc­ture refers to those parts of the sit­u­a­tion which are slow to change and rel­a­tively sta­ble. They may include things like organizational struc­ture, geo­graphic loca­tion, phys­i­cal lay­out and all the peo­ple who are affected by the sit­u­a­tion. Include only enough struc­ture to allow you to record the process and concerns.
• Include process. Process refers to the trans­for­ma­tions that go on within the struc­ture. These trans­for­ma­tions might be part of a flow of goods, doc­u­ments, or data. Again, don’t cap­ture all aspects of process; broad strokes suffice.
• Include con­cerns. Con­cerns cap­tures a par­tic­u­lar actor’s moti­va­tions for par­tic­i­pat­ing in the sit­u­a­tion. The dif­fer­ent moti­va­tions give rise to the dif­fer­ent per­spec­tives each actor has.
• Include your­self. Make sure your roles and rela­tion­ships in the sit­u­a­tion are clear.

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